BSDCan Trip Report: Renato Botelho

The next trip report is from Renato Botelho. He writes:

I arrived Tuesday morning after a long trip with 2 more friends, Luiz Otavio O Souza and André Oliveira. While waiting the bus, we met John Hixson, from ixSystems. After checking into the Residence, I used the afternoon to walk a bit in the city. At the end of the afternoon I went to the Royal Oak and met Diane Bruce and other developers.

The first session Wednesday morning was about the security incident from last year. It was really nice to hear what happened and what has been done since then to improve security on the FreeBSD cluster. After that, it was time for Netflix and FreeBSD, by Scott Long. It was really interesting to hear what is happening with FreeBSD inside Netflix.

In the afternoon, I attended the Ports and Packages working group. There were a lot of topics about what is being and what needs to be done to improve ports. The hot topic was cross-building ports.

In the evening I attended the Vendor Summit. It was another interesting series of discussions as there is a bunch of things to be done. The devsummit was really different from last time I attended in 2010, and it seems to be much more organized and productive the way it is now.

On Thursday morning I attended the Beyond Buildworld working group. The subject of cross-building was in evidence again, with other topics and volunteers for making the tasks. Other interesting topics included Crochet and Source Tinderbox Redport, besides other tools to make a developer’s life easier and help to keep the stability of the code.

In the afternoon I atteded the ATF working group. I hardly knew anything about ATF until this talk and started to play a bit with it after that. It’s a great testing framework and it would be really useful to have it integrated into src.

Friday was the BSDCan start day and the opening session was amazing. Eric Allman shared his experiences of having his own company based on an opensource product. It was a great time to hear from such an experienced guy and learn a lot about his experiences.

I also attended Kirk Mckusick’s talk about Security in the FreeBSD Kernel and the talk about NetBSD-based Radar, and after that MCLinker, which seems to be a promising project to replace current linker.

Day #2 started with Bob Beck telling about buffer cache in OpenBSD, and the future of wireless networking, by Adrian Chadd. After lunch, Henning Brauer told us the history of trouble they experienced with overcomplicated checksum on OpenBSD network stack. After that I was presented to newbus by Warner Losh, one of the best speakers of the conference in my opinion.

It was really good but was close to the end. The Closing Session was as cool as it was the last time I attended and we had a great time.

Sadly I didn’t go to tourist things on Sunday since I was not feeling that good. I spent Sunday doing not much and left for the airport in the afternoon for the long trip back home. It was a great time as I met other ports committers and had nice talks. I also met other pfSense developers and users, and my coworkers from BSD Perimeter.

I would like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation and BSD Perimeter for sponsoring this trip and making it possible to meet other developers and hear such high-level talks. Hope to see you all in Ottawa next year.